I broke my Ribcage

I’ve never felt this expression any more than now.

Sometimes you do everything right.

Then that one act of poor judgement snowballs into something worse.

• My form was perfect

• I was moving weight my muscles were very capable of moving

• I didn’t even go to failure

Yet, I still got injured.

This was something that was highly preventable.

Alright, I’ll stop teasing you, here’s the story.

Recently I decided to throw weighted dips into my program for my Triceps.

Before this, it’d probably been about 3 years since I touched dips thanks to taking the bulk too far…

But here’s the thing about Dips.

They’re a little different to normal presses where your back lies flat against something.

You have to brace against your own ribcage to make up for this.

Yeah, that’s something I’m not used too…

So here I am hitting the gym with my new exercise, learning a pattern quickly, having a lot of muscle capable of doing the movement, and moving up weight FAST.

Now this wouldn’t have been a huge problem if I was consistent.

But I ended up skipping a couple of the days I do dips on because of some stuff going on 😭 

So now I’ve missed out a lot of the sessions, but got very strong, and the ribcage has no experience at all with this sort of stress.

Then I go in, strap 20kg to myself and get dipping.

Towards the last few reps I get this insane chest pain that feels like my chest is being torn apart, that feels like a heart attack. I keep going of course.

I let the soreness go down a little, do my rest, and then go back to the set, pain just as bad as before.

I get home and lie in bed.

A few hours later I try and get myself up and the tiny movements trying to sit up in bed make my entire ribcage just surge with pain…

I couldn’t even support myself in bed 😭 

The very next day I ended up going out with some friends and there was this moment where I needed to push one of those doors that requires just a little bit of oomf to move.

At this point I knew I was saw and had injured/irritated something, but I gave it a go anyway.

As I progressively ramp up the effort I’m throwing on this door a single tear falls down my face from the pain.

I instantly stopped and realised it might be something serious.

Of course when I shared this with my coaching group (who had been loving the dips) all of them laughed at me and made fun of me…

So yeah, this was pretty rough. Although I did end up fixing it within about 2 weeks just knowing how to treat an injury, what to do, and what not to do.

See I probably shouldn’t have ramped things up that quickly, but now I know to watch out for my ribcage if I ever do something that loads it independently again.

Don’t make the same mistake I did, and take care.

Your Hypertrophy Hero,
Fletcher